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A Finnish socialist female parliamentarian stopped on the Dutch border: the (de) politicization of Finnish women’s suffrage in Dutch battles on votes for women This research article in transnational history analyses an incident during which Hilja Pärssinen, a Finnish socialist woman MP, was stopped on the Dutch border in September 1913 on her way to visit a suffragette college in London. This two-hour event at the border and public controversy that followed were clashes between competing ideological and gendered discourses on women’s political agency. The incident was a nexus of intersecting discourses on a range of issues: Dutch and international debates on women’s suffrage, discourse on ‘white slavery’, racial prejudices towards East Europeans, Marxist class struggle discourse, and fears of socialism. During the incident, the authorities seemed to be casting the identity of an illegal immigrant or a Russian prostitute on Pärssinen. Provoked against her psycho-physical experiences, she protested by performing that identity. Afterwards, transnationally connected socialists politicized the case in their fight for women’s political rights, while the authorities and the non-socialist press consistently depoliticized it.
This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). I web scraped a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2017. Using this data, I first show that the Russian mafia originated in the Gulag – the Soviet system of forced labor camps which housed around 18 million prisoners in the 1920s - 1950s period. Second, I document that the distance to the nearest camp is a strong negative predictor of mafia presence in Russia’s communities in the early post-Soviet period. Finally, using an instrumental variable approach which exploits the spatial distribution of the gulags, I examine the effects of mafia presence on local crime and elite violence in mid-1990s Russia. In particular, I show that the communities with mafia presence experienced a dramatic rise in crime driven by turf wars which erupted among rival clans around 1993 and persisted for much of the 1990. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that mafia presence led to a spike in attacks against businessmen, fellow criminals, as well as law enforcement officers and judges, while politically-motivated violence remained unaffected.